I used to strip the conformal coating off of fiberglass and EPOXY resin circuit cards. The Conformal coatings were of 2 basic types:
Liquid Silicon Rubber (soft coating) Epoxy -- type unknown (hard coating) The reason circuit cards were coated this way is because they were installled in the Avionics equipment "black boxes" on military aircraft, and thus subjected to rapid climactic changes -- in other words, water vapor condensed on the cards while the aircraft was in flight at various altitudes, and the conformal coating prevented electrical "arcing and sparking" because of water condensation, extreme altitude or both. Anyway, back at the ranch.... I was stripping the coating from a circuit card one Friday and I forgot about it, and left the circuit card in the bath over the weekend. Monday morning the conformal coating was certainly gone, but so was all of the epoxy resin in the circuit card itself. The circuit card looked like a sponge made of fiberglass strands. (Yes the card was toast). The magical solution to make this happen? (and I can't beleive you can still get these 3 solvents at Wal-mart, but it's true!) equal parts of MEK, Acetone, and Tolulene. Our "bath" was inside a ventilated hood, and we wore THICK rubber gloves, a Rubber apron, and face shields. -- Highly reccommended equipment if you want to continue enjoying a functioning healthy liver. The downside? It also disolves almost every type of plastic known to man. It even disolves certain types of silicon rubber I said _almost_ every type of plastic, but it didn't seem to bother the plastic IC chips on the cards. The military usally uses Radiation hardened Ceramic IC's for the most part, but there were a few plastic cased ones as well. If you are going to try this on a plastic model plane, I can almost guarantee you that the plane will disolve before the epoxy, _but_the_epoxy_WILL_disolve_ But then, your question was; "how to disolve epoxy", not "how to disolve _JUST_ the epoxy" :) So I would like to think I have helped you, but I really doubt that I have. good luck -- urufu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ urufu's Profile: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=111327 View this thread: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86126 RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
